How do the different components of Chinese characters contribute to the overall meaning?

Answer 1

Originally the Chinese characters were drawings of concrete objects (pictographs). But not everything is a concrete object. Therefore the next layer of characters are characters composed of 2 or more characters that hint at an abstract meaning. The most frequent example is good. The character for good

Answer 2

Originally the Chinese characters were drawings of concrete objects (pictographs). But not everything is a concrete object. Therefore the next layer of characters are characters composed of 2 or more characters that hint at an abstract meaning. The most frequent example is good. The character for good ºÃ h¨£o is composed of 2 characters: woman Å® n¨· and child ×Ó z¨« because woman + child = good. But not everything can be expressed by combinations of characters. The most basic example is grammatical particles because they have no meaning except for grammatical function. This next layer of characters are composed of a character that can somehow hint at the meaning + another character that sounds just like the character that is being composed. For example there is a interrogative particle ma Âð. It is composed of the character Âí m¨£ horse that hints at the pronunciation + the character ¿Ú k¨¯u mouth that somehow hints at the meaning. Over time such characters composed of pronunciation + meaning change their original pronunciation and therefore when you look at a character you see that it is made of several subcharacters but you still have to learn it by heart. All Chinese characters are made of the same several hundred parts. No new characters are created now. There is a process of character simplification in mainland China but this is a different question. There is a great site that shown you parts of characters: http://zhongwen.com/